


mark me (my hour is almost come)

by thetalkingcrocus



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gender-Neutral Runner Five, Other, Purgatory, Season/Series 02, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 17:30:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14501976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetalkingcrocus/pseuds/thetalkingcrocus
Summary: “My hour is almost come,When I to sulph'rous and tormenting flamesMust render up myself.” -Hamlet Act 1 Scene 5





	mark me (my hour is almost come)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to my tumblr July 20 2014. Spoilers up to and including S3M32.

_“My hour is almost come,_ __  
_When I to sulph'rous and tormenting flames_ _  
__Must render up myself.”_   **-Hamlet Act 1 Scene 5**

 _“For those who … still have some attachment to sin or there is some temporal punishment due for sin, such a soul experiences purgatory in the manner that God determines.”_   **-Friar John Echert**

* * *

 

There was a rattle in her lungs, then silence.

In the end, she had the gall to expect gates. Not necessarily pearly ones. In her mind they always looked like the solid, dependable, familiar gates of Abel township, though she wasn’t quite sure when she started seeing them that way. 

There were no gates. 

Instead there was fire and she was surrounded and couldn’t feel a thing. Not one thing, except perhaps a flicker of disappointment.

(where were her friends?)

(where were her boys?)

(they were too good for  _this,_ this was fit for her-)

(she’d been told that Hell would hurt) 

But then-

-then there was something else besides the fire and she clung to it with the determination she’d shown in life and then some because damn it, she didn’t suffer for this. There was death and there were flames and then-

-then there was Five. 

She clung to Five with all the loyalty she could muster and she whispered and spoke and offered wisdom and comfort and every time the words “My Five” passed her lips she held on ever tighter to the fragment of relief in the flames, which had started to hurt now. It was a dull, unpleasant ache at first, and it escalated to a sharp grinding unbearable pain.

The escape was like a rope and if there were others she’d never seen them and if Someone knew how this hellheavenpurgatoryafterlife worked nobody had explained it but half the time she had flames, flames that either brought her to agony but left no marks, or that she couldn’t feel until she felt she would lose what was left of her mind. When it got to that point, the flames stopped and she could see. She still couldn’t touch the world around her but seeing was something and one day, there were gates and they looked just like Abel’s. 

Because they were. 

She’d followed Five on runs and spoken all the while and encouraged and advised and no one else could hear her or at least they didn’t say so but Five smiled and this, this was  _something_. 

She couldn’t even see herself, but she could feel the tense and release of her legs as they hit the ground and that crept some relief into bones that had been charred to ash and scattered by the one person she had left.

Perhaps that was why.

Perhaps there was no way to know for sure.

She did try to reach the others. It was easiest when she could see them most clearly: when they were sleeping, when they were scared, when they were grieving. None were so clear as Five. Another mystery.

And then the boat. The ocean. Sister ship of the Aurora, only perhaps even more sinister. There was the tide and the drowning and the sharpest fear she’d ever felt as she said, tugging at her fellow runner, her friend, her Five with arms that weren’t even corporeal, “That’s my Five.”

She imagined the cold wet on her fingers until she could almost feel it, feel the cold flesh of Five’s arm under her hand as the two of them struggled upwards.

She channeled all the ruthlessness she’d ever cultivated into shoving Five towards the air, and when they broke the surface and gasped in blessed air, there was a sharp tug.

She was back in purgatory, with the flames licking away at the slight smile on her face, upturned in the fire like a phoenix.

Her eyes were triumphant.

Her hour had come.


End file.
